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Author: Dann Wilkens

Disruptive Technology: Paving Cow Paths or Breaking New Ground?

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

What is disruptive? Is it the company that reinvents a category, or the one that creates an entirely new category? In the case of cities, London’s road system was based on paving ancient pathways, while Washington D.C.’s grid was laid out in advance of breaking ground. Both are great cities today, but their structures came from entirely different ways of thinking.

The same is true of companies and brands.

Innovation is swirling around the financial sector today with companies reinventing ways to buy, sell, get paid, lend or borrow money, and finance companies. But for the most part, they are bringing their new thinking and technology to incrementally improve existing mechanisms. Even virtual currency is a new take on an old idea.

The practice of medicine is as old as civilization, but ongoing innovations in pharmaceuticals, medical technology, and data mining are enabling new predictive insights and treatment options that did not exist before.

Cloud services that leverage the connective tissue of the Internet are replacing old-school paper and obsolete digital records in every industry, speeding the availability and quality of information. Is this disruptive enough to stand out?

How can you stand out?

Of the roughly 6.3 million patents filed in the U.S. between 1999 and 2013 (2,481,795 granted), 53% were in computer technology, digital communication, telecommunications, semiconductors, electrical machinery, medical technology, pharmaceuticals, chemistry, biotechnology, and measurement sectors.

But 47% were in a category called “other.” So innovation is everywhere.

With that many innovations pouring out each year, how can a company differentiate its technology enough to stand out? Brand strategy can help.

Brand strategy and branding can help

Brand strategy is a process that helps business people identify what’s important about a new technology, product, or service. Why it matters, who stands to benefit from it, and who might stand in its way.

Brand strategy, especially emotive branding techniques, also defines how to communicate the most important facts about a new concept to people in a way that connects on a deeper, more emotionally meaningful level. It helps companies scale and grow product lines, penetrate new markets, and spread globally.

No matter what you’re inventing or reinventing, brand strategy can put it into a meaningful context that people can understand and identify with. It works for incremental advances in existing categories – paving the cow paths – and for brand new ideas that don’t fit into a conventional category.

See how we’ve helped many disruptive technologies launch, grow, and thrive.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency

 

Could Your Brand Ever Command as Much Loyalty as a Sports Team?

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

Sports Fan Loyalty

Brand Loyalty – a strong feeling of support or allegiance.

At least once a year, my good friend wears the 40 year-old T-shirt of his favorite sports team. It’s too small. It’s faded and threadbare in places. It’s garish color looks terrible on him. It has a hole in the shoulder. But he loves it. It represents something that matters to him. His team.

40 years ago they won an NBA championship. Who knew at the time that it would take 40 years to get another chance? Over the decades, even though the team had highs and low, he still held out the hope that they could be great again. And he is so proud of his team right now.

The amazing thing is how attached we become to our teams. How does this happen? How is it that we become a dyed-in-the-wool Badger, or an Old Blue, or a fan for life?

Wouldn’t it be great if your brand could earn such unswerving loyalty?

To find out, let’s break down how it happens with sports teams.

Geography – When you live in a town, it’s hard to escape noticing the local team. Brands that have a consistent presence over time get noticed. And when a rival team invades your town, when it’s us against them, you automatically line up on the side of the locals, even if you’re just a casual, fair-weather fan.

Parents – You grew up listening to games on the radio with your dad. You grew up watching games on TV with your mom. Their deep feelings for the team became your deep feelings. Your brand loyalties were embedded early on through osmosis by the people you respect the most.

Friends – It’s contagious. If your friends are huge fans, it’s hard not to get caught up in their excitement. The example of their engagement, commitment and strong emotions rubs off on you. After all, it feels good to be part of the team, especially if it’s with your friends.

The Monday morning coffee break – “Hey, that was some game on Saturday, right?” When people talk about the team on Monday morning, you want to join in. You want to have a point of view. So you get pulled into the conversation, and into fan-hood, without really trying.

Creating Meaningful Connections

So what can a brand that doesn’t hit home runs or shoot three-pointers do to inspire a loyal following? It’s not so different from sports. It’s really simple. It is all about creating meaningful brand connections, as often as possible, to inspire people to go out of their way to support the brand.

Done consistently, that’s how a brand can hit a home run.

  • Geography is like community. If your brand pays close attention to your community and respects their needs and wishes, it will create consistent, meaningful experiences and stick in their minds and connect to their hearts.
  • Parents are like thought-leaders. When a brand leads from a purposeful belief, it can connect with people who share the same ideals. When your brand truly matters, people change the way they think and feel about your brand and you create a long-lasting relationship that can withstand the test of time. Some even call it loyalty.
  • Friends are like word of mouth. A positive word from someone you know is the strongest endorsement. If your brand behaves with emotional integrity and respects each individual customer every time in every brand experience, it can earn the kind of loyalty that friends share with their friends.
  • The Monday morning coffee break is like a conversation with a group of informed colleagues. If your brand performs consistently well with everyone it encounters, the weight of public opinion will be on your side, even when people are from different levels or walks of life.

Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty has always come by emotional engagement. Creating meaningful connections and differentiation is where loyalty happens.

Your brand may not inspire fans to get tattoos or wear 40 year-old T-shirts. But it can form a strong emotional connection with people by learning what matters to them, by understanding their feelings and by behaving in a way that shows that you care about them.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco Bay Area-based brand strategy firm with an emotive approach to branding.

Product Design and Brand Strategy?

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

Product Design and Brand Strategy?

Too often marketers and product developers don’t see the connection between product design and brand strategy. We’ve noticed this trend, especially with technology companies. Products can suffer growing pains if they are conceived, gestated, and born into the world without the guiding hand of the brand. On the flipside, brand strategy can have an enormously reassuring influence on the design of a product. In fact, our brand strategies exert positive influences on the product designs of most of our clients, in direct and indirect ways.

Here’s how.

Empathy

Brand strategy always starts with a thorough study of target audiences, which means understanding what makes them tick. Their needs, expectations, pains, and joys. When a brand really gets their user base and absorbs their point of view into the planning process, they can design more meaningful, more successful products.

Brand Promise

Brand strategy synthesizes a company’s business strategy, purpose, and product positioning into a distinctive promise that informs everything the brand stands for. Who the brand serves, what the brand brings to the table, and why it matters to people. Over the long months it takes to build a product, it’s tough to stay true to the emotional impact you hope your product will deliver. The promise at the core of your brand strategy is the beacon you can follow, with constant guidance to help you build a brand-appropriate product experience.

Brand Voice

How your product meaningfully connects with people matters more than you might suspect. You want the product to inspire meaningful feelings like excitement, amazement, or delight. Brand strategy sets the tone by establishing a voice that’s consistent with your promise. Brand voice is a delicate thing, which can include words, sound effects, and music. It doesn’t just fall out of the sky. It’s developed through a rigorous brand strategy process. It’s explored. It’s discovered. It’s developed. It rarely comes from QA engineers writing error messages.

Dialog

Ever make a mistake using an app? How can it be a mistake if you happen to press the wrong button in a confusing UI? Ninety percent of the time, when a user gets derailed in an app, it’s because the app itself is too complicated or the navigation is deranged. In other words, it’s not your fault, Citizen User.

So is it ever appropriate for a sensible brand to write the word ERROR in a dialog box? The clue is the term “dialog.” A product is a dialog with a user. A human being. A person. A person like you does not need a product to waggle a finger and issue a stern warning. If the product needs to help the user make a better decision, it’s called coaching. Encouraging. Extending a helping hand. Dialog. Not an error warning. Not lecturing. Not accusing. Not criticizing. Brand strategy provides guardrails for voice and behavior so your product doesn’t veer off track.

Once you’ve built a product with your brand strategy firmly in mind, you’ll wonder how you ever built anything without it. And whether you’re building an app, an online service, a mobile device, a piece of electronic hardware, a wearable gizmo, or any product that a human being touches, you’ll never build anything without a brand strategy again.

Emotive Brand teams up with clients to ensure that the brand strategy finds its way into the product experience to make a meaningful impact on users. To experience brand strategy the Emotive Brand way, give us a call.

To read more on this subject: Brand Strategy and the Value of Creative Design 

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Overcome Startup Competition in a Crowded Eco-system

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

Startup Competition is fierce

Startup competition is tough. People used to think that consumers have mind-space for only three brands in any given category: the leader, the challenger, and the one other company lucky enough (or hard-working enough) to be noticed and considered. The rule of three may still be true, but the sheer proliferation of brands flooding a truly congested sector can starve every brand for oxygen and make it difficult for any brand to stand out.

We deal with a lot of clients in crowded, complex categories and ecosystems: technology companies, software companies, professional services companies, media companies, etc. B2B companies rarely have simple value chains. A messy B2B2B ecosystem is more typical, sometimes extending into B2C. In especially jam-packed categories, it’s doubly hard for a company to stand out.

Today, it’s actually normal to have hundreds of companies in your category. Categories like AdTech, MarTech, Big Data, Analytics, SaaS, the list goes on. In your case, you still want to know how your brand can stand tall enough to get a steady flow of oxygen, recruit the very best talent, and remain healthy.

In these over-crowded categories you may find yourself fighting against forces greater than direct competitors. Sheer clutter can be a more powerful distraction to potential customers than any competitor’s offering. Your brand and how it connects to the people that matter to you is a key in differentiating yourself from your startup competition.

A few guidelines from the world of brand strategy:

Be true to yourself and your purpose

At the brand level, you’re not competing product vs. product. It’s not a feature vs. feature game. Your brand needs to have a relevant place in your customers’ hearts and minds. So be true to your brand and the promise you make and bring it out in everything you do. Leading from your authentic vision and consistency of purpose will help your brand mean more to people. And that alone will make you more memorable. 

Turn your back on competitors

Yes, ignore them. They aren’t running your business. You are. So instead of focusing on your competitors, focus on your customers. Be empathetic. Know them inside and out. Learn what makes them tick, how they feel, what they need. This may sound like basic sales training, but it’s vital at the brand level, too. If you know what matters to your prospects, you can structure your brand offering with the confidence that it will connect.

Don’t chase your tail

It’s tempting to try to react to competitors. Some companies consume excessive quantities of precious time and resources tweaking their positioning, their marketing, or even their products to fend off competitive threats. If you have a well-conceived brand strategy to begin with, your brand will have a strong connection to people who matter on an emotional level. Your brand will be founded on what you believe. Knowing what you believe makes you stand out from the crowd.

Live your brand promise

Brands that are meaningful and stand the test of time – the ones that stand out from competitors – are driven by the behavior of people who are committed to living up to the brand’s promise. Every single interaction people have with your brand needs to reflect the brand strategy in order to solidify the brand’s position in their minds.  How you go to market, the look and feel of your branded communications, how your brand speaks and what it says, the way your brand makes people feel, and how your brand behaves at every brand touch-point. No interaction is unimportant. Everyone needs to be on-board with living the strategy.  So don’t keep your brand strategy bottled up deep in a file cabinet. Socialize your strategy from top down and bottom up so everyone in the company knows the story and lives it.

So if you wake up one day and find your company surrounded by hundreds of other companies clamoring for oxygen in your category, you’ll know it’s time to take a deep breath and take a fresh look at your brand.  Focusing on a brand strategy can help you can better articulate “why you matter” and better articulate your true differentiation, and create a strong and compelling go to market strategy. A brand strategy will help you cut through the clutter and stand out in an over crowded eco-system.

Emotive Brand operates in a crowded category with many other brand strategy firms. We stand out by knowing what we believe in and by sticking to our promise to transform the way brands reach out to people and the way people respond to brands.

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Read more about how to differentiate your brand.

Learn more about an AdTech brand we helped create true differentiation for here.

 

How Brand Strategy Can Meaningfully Improve Product Design

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

We’ve noticed a product trend, especially with technology companies. Products can suffer growing pains if they are conceived, gestated, and born into the world without the guiding hand of the brand. On the flipside, brand strategy can have an enormously reassuring influence on the design of a product. In fact, our brand strategies exert positive influences on the product designs of most of our clients, in direct and indirect ways.

Here’s how.

Empathy

Brand strategy always starts with a thorough study of target audiences, which means understanding what makes them tick. Their needs, expectations, pains, and joys. When a brand really gets their user base and Continue reading “How Brand Strategy Can Meaningfully Improve Product Design”

Your Business Problems Might Have a Brand Strategy Solution

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

When you spend a lot of time working with people in the C-suite, you’re exposed to C-sized business problems. Those larger strategic issues that can’t be solved by the CEO alone, or by existing resources. When changes in your industry push you to shift business strategy, it’s a sign that your brand strategy needs to shift in a synchronized way to reposition for success.

Example: We’ve surveyed C-level executives about the number one desire they have for their brand strategy. Know what they want? Differentiation. A competitive advantage. A defensible position. Differentiation is tough. When your competitors are howling like wolves at the door, how can you stand out from the pack? If your company plays a supporting role in a complex ecosystem, how can you stand out from the crowd? Brand strategy can help.

Continue reading “Your Business Problems Might Have a Brand Strategy Solution”

Brand Strategy and the Value of Creative Design

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

At Emotive Brand, we are keenly aware of the symbiotic relationship between brand strategy and creative design. In the traditional model, the company leadership team aligns on a new brand strategy and design brings it to life. You know the drill: new logo, new color scheme, new typography, new website.

But there’s a deeper relationship between strategy and design that yields more meaningful, more memorable results. Creative design is not an appendage of brand strategy. Fundamentally, design IS strategy and strategy IS design. At least that’s how it works at Emotive Brand.

Continue reading “Brand Strategy and the Value of Creative Design”

CSR and Purpose-Driven Brands Go Hand in Hand

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

CSR and purpose go hand in hand.  We are always moved when companies make a profound effort to identify and then act on a social issue. Especially very large companies. We know how hard it can be. It’s not always obvious how to identify an issue that matters to your brand, and then do the hard work to identify the brand with solutions that matter to people.

Making a CSR part of the brand’s core purpose takes commitment from the top. It takes time and it takes money. But it can have a huge pay-off when handled with authentic, sincere, and meaningful programs that are appropriate for the markets in which Continue reading “CSR and Purpose-Driven Brands Go Hand in Hand”